Month: May 2012

Adding a new storage device using Windows 2008 Failover Clustering has been simplified enormously since the Windows 2003 and older clustering technology. In this post, I’ll show you how to add an extra storage device to your configuration. First thing you will need to do is get your SAN administrator to present a new disk to the cluster. Once the new disk is presented, go to Disk Management, and you should see the new disk unallocated. If the disk displays “Offline” simply right click and choose Online.

Next, right click on the disk and choose “New Simple Volume”. Clustering does not support any of the other volume options.

After clicking “New Simple Volume” a wizard will appear.

Click Next and you will see the following page. Choose your volume size and click Next.

Choose a drive letter, create a mount point on an existing disk or do not assign a drive letter. In this example, I’ll give the disk a drive letter of F. Click Next.

On this screen, you will need to format the volume using NTFS and you can rename the volume to better identify it later on. I will also perform a quick format. Click Next and Finish to format.

Installing a cluster is just the beginning of a DBA’s administrative duties. In this post, I’ll show you a few management tasks that may help the novice. Most tasks will be carried out using Failover Cluster Management which is the management console built into Windows Server 2008. You can access the Failover Cluster Management in a couple of different ways:

Go to Server Manager, Features, Failover Cluster Manager

Go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Failover Cluster Manager

Once you open Failover Cluster Manager let’s see what can be done inside of this console.

View Status of Services and Applications

Inside of Failover Cluster Manager, if you click on Services and Applications you are presented with a wealth of information.

In this example, I have a multiple instance cluster that consists of four instances on a two node active/passive cluster. After clicking Services and applications, you can see in the right pane all the instances, status, type, current owner (or current node that they exist on) and if they are set to auto start. In the right pane, if you click on a specific instance you can see more information regarding this instance at the bottom.

Likewise, if you drilldown from Services and applications and click on an instance name you will see even more information regarding this instance that includes server name, IP address, disk information, and the services that are clustered.